He Toronto Star

he Toronto Star

April 5, 1992, Sunday, SUNDAY SECOND EDITION Kurds dread departure of guardians Saddam expected to strike if coalition forces pull out

BYLINE: By Bob Hepburn Toronto Star

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 1937 words

DATELINE: ERBIL, Iraq

ERBIL, Iraq - Muhsin Othman walks confidently into the no- man's land separating his scraggly Kurdish guerrilla fighters from the Iraqi army's elite Republican Guards. Othman is the perfect model of a peshmerga (those who face death) fighter - upright, strikingly handsome in his baggy pants and colorful cummerbund with a loaded pistol at his hip. "It won't be easy to stop the Iraqis," he says as he strides across an open field. "They have put their strongest divisions here. They are planning to attack. They are just waiting for a sign from the West."

Othman is commander of the Kurdish front on an isolated stretch of road about 10 kilometres (six miles) outside Erbil, the largest city under Kurdish control in northern Iraq. Here, across a flat plain, is where the Iraqi forces, now barely three kilometres (two miles) away, are likely to launch their campaign to recapture the wide swath of northern Iraq they lost last spring to the Kurds. The Kurds believe Iraqi President Saddam Hussein will order his troops to advance as soon as Western coalition forces, principally the Americans, withdraw from the region. That could happen as early as June 28 when the last eight coalition soldiers in northern Iraq leave, and when the U.S. air force halts its daily overflights from its base at Incirlik in southern Turkey. More and more Iraqi troops, tanks, armored personnel carriers and attack helicopters are pouring into area. Every day there are fresh reports of shelling along the ceasefire line that divides Iraqi forces from the peshmerga. Some days as many as 300 shells rain down on the Kurds. So far, the shelling has merely turned up sod in the surrounding wheat and tomato fields. No Kurds have been injured. "They dig holes to scare our people," Othman says as he stands over a shell crater. "They are trying to weaken our morale." The peshmergas have a romantic image as fearless mountain fighters. They may be, but at first glimpse they appear a disorganized, poorly trained and badly equipped band of mostly unemployed youths. Othman's troops look like they could fight off the Iraqi troops for minutes, not hours or days. They are armed with Kalashnikov rifles, some mortars, a few rocket- propelled grenades. Othman claims to have an anti-tank gun mounted on a pickup truck but it was nowhere to be seen. At a peshmerga camp outside Zakho, the guerrillas sleep in the bombed-out barracks of an old Iraqi military post. There is no electricity, no heat. Windows are covered with corrugated metal against the cold winds. The "guard house" at the entrance is an old cardboard box once used to pack a refrigerator. The fighters eat rice, flat bread and a watery bean soup for dinner - night after night. On the rare evenings when a small generator is working, the men sit around in silence watching Arabic game shows broadcast on Syrian and Turkish television. Still, the peshmergas are determined to battle Saddam to the death. "If we are united, we will be strong," says Othman Hama, a 51- year-old fighter on the Erbil front line. "Let the Iraqis come to the city. We are ready for him." But Hama, who has been a peshmerga since 1963, is tired. He hopes the next battle will be the last. "Maybe the government will collapse," he says wistfully. Then, sadly, he adds that the Kurdish rebels "maybe lack financial means" to buy the bullets, mortars and artillery necessary to withstand an Iraqi onslaught. Barzan Hassan Molud, 25, has been a peshmerga for nine years. He saw two brothers die in battle with the Iraqis but is convinced the Kurds can defeat Saddam next time. "We fought the government five times when it had chemical weapons, so it will be easy to fight it now when it has none," Molud says as he peers toward the Iraqi lines. "We are strong; our morale is higher." It has been a long winter in the area called Free Kurdistan. The Kurds, who are short of food, fuel, medicine and weapons, are trying to cope with the complexities of administering the mountainous area that encompasses about 10 per cent of Iraq. At the same time, they are trying to determine whether the Western coalition will come to their aid if Saddam attacks. They also are concerned about the possibility the United Nations will terminate relief operations at the end of April. The U.N. has spent more than $250 million in Iraq since the end of the Gulf war but now feels its emergency aid role is over because most of the Kurds who fled last spring have returned to their villages. Some remain in refugee camps because they cannot return to areas still held by the Iraqis, such as the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. Kurds point to Bush's indecision last spring when he encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Saddam, then failed to send troops to save them when Iraqi forces launched a brutal counterattack. Up to 2 million Kurds fled across snowy mountain passes to safety in Turkey and Iran. Bush has said repeatedly he wants Saddam removed from power. On the other hand, he also wants to keep Iraq intact and is afraid of getting involved in the baffling world of internal Kurdish politics. The Kurds also claim that while Bush has constantly demanded Saddam allow U.N. inspections of Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons, he has ignored Saddam's economic and trade embargo against Kurdistan that has caused widespread shortages of food and fuel. The shortages are much worse then those suffered in southern Iraq, which already is under a U.N.-imposed economic blockade. Still, many Kurds believe Bush will stand by the Kurds. "We think George Bush will be more helpful in an election year," said Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two major Kurdish political organizations. "He didn't finish the job and remove Saddam Hussein and he doesn't want to be reminded of it as the U.S. election gets closer." Iraq suffered massive military losses during the Gulf war but still has about 50 per cent of its pre-war military capacity. "Given the right opportunity, Saddam will attempt to move north," said a Western ambassador based in Turkey. "He's stupid enough and power hungry enough to try." The envoy is also convinced the United States will strike back at Iraq the moment it attacks the Kurds or the rebellious Shiites in southern Iraq. Furthermore, he believes the United States will keep flying patrols over northern Iraq after its current mandate ends in late June. Turkey is pressuring the Americans to end the flights but likely will knuckle under to subtle U.S. pressure. In an interview at his mountain headquarters in the village of Kalocholin, Talabani said Saddam is too afraid of coalition forces to march north in the near future. Talabani believes Washington and London will extend the current mandate to keep coalition forces in the region after the June deadline. "I cannot accept the idea the Iraqis are planning for an immediate attack," he said. "The morale of the Iraqi army is very low, it cannot fight well or launch a widescale offensive." He quickly added, however, that "Saddam isn't working in a logical way. We must expect him to attack at anytime." Talabani is a boisterous, heavy-set man who paces from one end of his office to the other. He constantly fingers his prayer beads while a bored bodyguard watches in silence. Talabani spends much of his day talking with foreign journalists (he hosted a lunch for an NBC-TV crew) and trying to manage what he says is a 125,000-member militia. "We must train the peshmerga very well for the day when the allies leave," he said. "We must find a way of buying arms. We must depend on the outside for help." Talabani said most of the PUK weapons belonged to the Iraqi army before the Kurdish uprising. Disenchanted Iraqi soldiers still provide arms to the Kurds, he said. What Talabani failed to mention was that much of the money the Kurds use to buy weapons reportedly comes from drug smuggling and European bank robberies. While the Kurds are worried about their immediate safety, they also are struggling to restore some semblance of economic life to their devastated region. Kurdish organizations are working with international agencies to rebuild villages, roads, bridges, schools and hospitals that Saddam destroyed in the 1980s. Talabani is convinced the Kurds will have a better chance of survival if they can revive the economy quickly. He talked of reopening cement and cigarette factories, of injecting money into agriculture to allow farmers to buy seeds and diesel oil for their tractors. "This devil Saddam Hussein was planning to annihilate Kurdistan," the rebel leader said. "He tried to destroy the economic fabric of the people, of the villages." Talabani wants to develop some type of relations, formal or informal, with neighboring Turkey and Iran. Both countries, however, are wary of dealing with the Iraqi Kurds because of internal strife with their own Kurdish populations. Iran and Turkey thus remain opposed to any hint of an independent Kurdistan as their neighbor, while the Iraqi Kurds need open borders to be able to ship wheat, fruits and vegetables to overseas markets. In the face of all these difficulties, the Kurds are trying to stage their first election, now scheduled for April 30 after two postponements. Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic party, originally proposed the vote for a national assembly as a way to improve the administration of Kurdish-held territory. Currently, the Iraqi Kurdistan Front is in charge of daily and long- range planning for the area. The front is comprised of eight Kurdish militia parties, ranging from the big groups headed by Talabani and Barzani to splinter groups with barely 1,000 members. In recent months, rivalry between the different factions has turned the front into an unwieldy operation that is bogged down in petty disputes and personal jealousies. Saddam has warned the Kurds that he won't tolerate the election unless the Kurds stop dealing with Western countries. He has accused Kurdish leaders of being foreign agents out to destroy Iraq. "They want to turn Kurdistan into a termite to devour the whole of Iraq," he said in a recent Baghdad speech. Andrew Whitley, director of Middle East Watch, an international human rights organization, said the election is a sign the Kurds are trying to organize themselves on a democratic basis. Voting will be monitored by international observers. "An election that would have genuine legitimacy is necessary for the Kurds to negotiate with Baghdad and also with outside world," he said recently. On March 22, 1945, William Morland, the charge d'affairs at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, wrote a top-secret memo to the state department in Washington. Morland described the plight of the Kurds and why they were pleading for Western help. "The basic grievances of the Iraqi Kurds is apparently that they do not want to be a minority and that in general they dislike, distrust and hold in contempt the Arab government in Baghdad," he wrote in the document, which has seen been declassified. "Grievances include insufficient schools and teachers, poor communications, deplorable health conditions, low prices and inadequate markets for agricultural produce. "They want some form of self-rule and local autonomy so they might themselves be responsible for the solutions of their own problems - if not an independent nation." Forty-seven years later, the Kurds are voicing the same complaints and seeking the same solutions. * Tomorrow: Saddam's torture cells. Part 2

PERSON: SADDAM HUSSEIN (92%); SADDAM HUSSEIN (92%);

ORGANIZATION: US AIR FORCE (54%);

COUNTRY: IRAQ (96%); UNITED STATES (94%); TURKEY (79%);

COMPANY: US AIR FORCE (54%);

SUBJECT: ARMED FORCES (91%); REBELLIONS & INSURGENCIES (90%); ARMIES (90%); MILITARY WEAPONS (89%); WAR & CONFLICT (78%); AIR FORCES (78%); VEHICLE & BODY ARMOR (73%); MOTOR VEHICLES (72%);

LOAD-DATE: May 12, 1999

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: Reuter photo: Kurdish guerrilla & anti-aircraft gun; Star photo (Spremo) U.S. marine & German helicopter; Map Iraq & Kurdish areaKurdistan; in; Question; The; dilemma; of; a; people; without; a; nation; Iraq; series; foreign; relations; United; States